Category: Quick Links

HotSwap, selling cars online with Web 2.0

Posted on by chris

There’s a new online second-hand car site called Hotswap.com (hat-tip) which allows account holders to upload videos about their car. The design is good and there are some neat tricks thrown in with nifty AJAX (for instance filtering cars by colour). But there are two points to note which I think are indicative of the way the web is moving.

Firstly is the use of Jeroen’s Flash video player, a free Flash player for video. Just like his Flash MP3 player (which I’ve used all over BeatsBase.com) it makes it easy to provide good-looking media capabilities to a web page. HotSwap have certainly benefited from Jeroen’s generosity.

The second point is that hosting for the videos and images is handled by ,a href=”http://www.amazon.com/s3″>Amazons S3 service, the massively scalable solution I mentioned a few days ago. So HotSwap don’t pay directly for the bandwidth they use, and they also have the technology scalability of one of the worlds largest websites behind them. Good move.

So there’s two ways that a new start-up is harnessing the power of the web: using the high-quality free tools available, and using commercial services designed to scale. This, I believe, will be a model for a lot of new websites to come.

Mosso – the hosting system

Posted on by chris

Although I’m very happy with Dreamhost, my dream host this new internet services company looks interesting. I suppose they’re making a similar kind of system as Amazon’s S3 and EC2 products – big bangs for your buck.

For people running large web applications this type of hosting is a must. For work we’re using a local, but very large, company for our hosting (which includes email, websites, extranet systems and much more). I took a look round their datacentres a couple of months ago, but as (regular reader of this blog) Mark says “once you’ve seen one datacenter you’ve seen them all”. Wise words. There are only so many rows of rack-mounted servers a man can take.

The good thing about this Mosso offering is they seem to straddle the gap between the “serious” hosts (of which I count Dreamhost one) and the really huge stuff such as Amazons systems. I’m sure there’s a market for it, and their mix of technology, user-friendliness and slick design makes me think they will be a force to be reckoned with.

Web developers in short supply

Posted on by chris

A recent article in Computing.co.uk highlighted the fact that web developers are in short supply. I’m sure this is true, with more and more companies waking up to the potential of the web. However there’s one bit I’m not sure I agree with, a quote from Atsco chief executive Ann Swain:

‘It was relatively easy to publish a decent web site back then, but now it’s difficult without expert programming skills.’

Really? I think it’s easier than ever to publish a decent website – as long as you’re not wanting all the latest bells and whistles. And even if you do want an AJAX-ified, People Powered, Social Media 2.0 web application there are easily utilised methods for putting the click-candy into a site.

Still, I’m glad that quality web developers are getting the attention they deserve. It’s a tough job, being a mix of many different disciplines none of which is easy to master. It’s good news for me, as the need for my services isn’t diminishing.